His thoughts that evening were for Joan and the dishonor that had descended upon her name. Though her heroism had pardoned him, he had no pardon for his own heart. His father’s iconoclasm had been no great doom to him. He had foreshadowed the worst after his last parley with his wife. It was the future that troubled him that evening, the future streaked with foam like a stormy sea. Joan’s heart was his. It was Gabriel’s thought that night how best he could casket this treasure against the world.
As the west darkened he entered the library by the garden window, and lit the lamp with his own hands. The immediate purpose to abandon Saltire was as iron in his mind. His needs should not be beholden for a day to his father’s exchequer. The two hundred pounds he would reserve for a season, but he would refund the sum when the chance served him.
He unlocked his desk, sorted his letters, bound Joan’s in a bundle and laid them against his heart. As for the minor records of Mammon, he set them in order, a sinister legacy dedicated to his father’s care. He constructed a list of his small possessions, his books, his personal belongings, the presents of his friends. He had determined to claim but little as his own. Lastly, he took Ophelia’s letters from their drawer, tore them in fragments, burned them as a sacrifice to the future good of his soul.
The night was calm and placid, the sky ablaze with stars. A great silence pervaded the house, a silence figurative of Gabriel’s fortune. He was utterly alone, nor did the solitude grieve him, for he had his thoughts. Joan, in the spirit, stood ever at his elbow. On the morrow he would ride towards Rilchester and speak with her. Together they would take counsel of the Great Father and their own hearts, that Love might show to them the dawn-star of the future.
It was verging on midnight, and Gabriel was still writing at his desk when he heard a sound as of footsteps on the gravel-path. He straightened in his chair and listened. The French window stood open, showing a faint, silvery sky and the deep gloom of the summer garden. A shadow stole suddenly into the stream of light. The man started up and moved towards the window. A figure dawned to him out of the dusk, the tall, slim figure of Joan Gildersedge.
Gabriel gave a sudden cry.
“Joan!”
She came in to him, a cloak over her shoulders, her hat carried in her hand. The light glimmered on her hair. Her dress was damp with dew, her face white and strained, her eyes full of a strange despair.
“Joan!”
She tottered in as though weary even to death. Gabriel sprang to her, thrust forward a chair. She sank into it, her hands hanging limply over her knees, her head thrown back so that her white throat showed to the collar of her dress.